Step 2 – All articles with at least one similar tag

Step 3 – Unwind by tags

If you’re not familiar with unwind look here. That way, we get article copy for every tag for each article.

{ "$unwind" => "$tags" }

Step 4 – Second matching

You may wonder, why we filter results again. Well The initial filtering was not required, but we did this to remove all non-related articles, so the data set is much smaller. Unfortunately unwind created document copy per each of the tags – even those that we don’t want to. That’s why we have to filter it again.

"$match" => {
tags: { "$in" => %w{ ruby rails mongoid mongodb } }
}

Note that we don’t need to filter out again by ID, since in incoming dataset we already don’t have the current_article document instance.

Step 5 – Grouping

Now we can group by documents ID. Also we will add sum for grouping, so we will know similarity level for each document. One point in sum equals one similar matching tag.

{ "$group" => {
_id: "$_id",
matches: {"$sum" =>1}
}
}

Step 6 – Sorting

Now we can sort by sum to have elements in descending order (most similar on top):

{ "$sort" => {matches:-1} }

Step 7 – 10 first elements

And the last step – limiting:

{ "$limit" => 10 }

Making it all work together

In order to execute this whole code in Ruby, we need to use Article.collection.aggregate method:

We won’t get Ruby objects as a result (we’ll get an array of hashes). We can process it further if we need similarity level, but if we just need similar articles (for example to display them) we can just:

Ransack is a rewrite of MetaSearch. It allows you to create search forms and sorting for your ActiveRecord data. Somehow I really miss that, when working with Mongoid. To be honest I can even live without the whole Ransack search engine, but I liked the UI helpers for search forms and sorting data.

with Mongoid documents. It turns out, that if you don’t need really sophisticated stuff, you can use Ransack helpers even with Mongoid. In order to use search/sort UI features, you need @search Ransack model instance. It is based on ActiveRecord data and unfortunately we don’t have any models that would suit our needs. That’s why we need to create a dummy one:

module System
# In order to use Ransack helpers and engine for non AR models, we need to
# initialize @search with AR instance. To prevent searching (this is just a stub)
# we do it usign ActiveRecord dummy class that is just a blank class
class ActiveRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.columns
@columns ||= []
end
end
end

This is enough to use it in controllers and views:

# In order to use Ransack helpers and engine for non AR models, we need to
# initialize @search with AR instance. To prevent searching (this is just a stub)
# we do it with none
def search
@search ||= ::System::ActiveRecord.none.search(params[:q])
end

It is a dummy ActiveRecord class, that will always return empty scope (none), but it is more than enough to allow us to work with UI helpers. To handle ordering of Mongoid document collection, we could use following code:

module System
module Mongoid
# Order engine used to order mongoid data
# It is encapsulated in segment module, because we store here all the
# things that are related to filtering/ordering data
#
# Since it returns the resource/scope that was provided, modified
# accordingly to sorting rules, this class can be used in defined
# scopes and it will work with scope chainings
class Orderable
# @param resource [Mongoid::Criteria] Mongoid class or a subset
# of it (based on Mongoid::Criteria)
# @param rules [Hash] hash with rules for ordering
# @return [Mongoid::Criteria] mongoid criteria scope
# @example
# System::Mongoid::Orderable.new(current_app.users, params[:q])
def initialize(resource, rules = {})
@rules = rules
@resource = resource
end
# Applies given sort order if there is one.
# If not, it will do nothing
# @example Ordered example scope
# scope :order, -> order { System::Mongoid::Orderable.new(self, order).apply }
def apply
order unless @rules.blank?
@resource.criteria
end
private
# Sets given order based on order rules (if there are any)
# or it will do nothing if no valid order rules provided
def order
order = "#{@rules[:s]}".split(' ')
@resource = order.blank? ? @resource : @resource.order_by(order)
end
end
end
end

This can be used to create scopes like that:

class User
include Mongoid::Document
include Mongoid::Attributes::Dynamic
# Scope used to set all the params from ransack order engine
# @param [Hash, nil] hash with order options or nil if no options
# @return [Mongoid::Criteria] scoping chain
# @example
# User.order(params[:q]).to_a #=> order results
scope :order, -> order { System::Mongoid::Orderable.new(self, order).apply }
end